The anticipation of the start of the 23rd season of the U.I.M. F1 World Championship has come to the lovely seaside setting of the inner harbour of the capital city of Doha, Qatar, and as many teams are focusing on the Friday morning first practice session, others are scrambling to just get their boats in the paddock and out of their containers.

The XPV Racing Team of David and Bob Trask had been waiting patiently for their two boats to arrive via container ship from Australia, however paper work confusion forced a two day delay in not only finding the container with the two race boats on board, but as bad luck would have it, the container was on the bottom of the ship forcing a scramble to get the boats unloaded and through customs before the 8 pm Thursday night deadline.

"We were in a panic, we looked for our shipment for two days before we found the right ship it was on," stated Bob Trask leader of the XPV Racing effort. "We got everything taken care of courtesy of our local promoter Mr. Mohammed Al Jaidah and logistics director Ms. Lavinia Cavallero of Idea Marketing and we made it by an eyelash."

As the drama of this event was being taken care of at one end of the paddock, further down pit row, Portuguese pilot Duarte Benavente was rigging his brand new Dragon design F1 hull out of the workshops of ex-World Champion Jonathan Jones from Wales in a great hurry while knowing he will be on a giant learning curve with the new design in his first practice session. His teammate Andy Elliott of Great Britain will also have a Dragon design on hand and should be a giant help to him in preparing for the circuit.

Other surprising news came from the World Championship camp of the Tamoil Team as expected number two driver Fabian Kalsow of Germany didn't make the trip to Doha after breaking his foot. He is now being replaced by test driver Ivan Brigada of Italy who will be making his 4th career start after having another busy season in the winter months running F2 Presidents Cup in the Middle East.

Today's schedule will highlight one practice session followed by two timed sessions and a top-6 shootout to determine tomorrows line-up for the 2nd Annual Grand Prix of Qatar expected to begin at 15:00 local, 13:00 GMT.